Lance’s day started out routinely enough. Already in his early 20’s, he’d dropped out of a 4 year college program to pursue a trade school program as a mechanic. The appeal of this choice faded, however, when he saw the even greater long term career opportunities through higher education, & now was working on his bachelor’s degree at a local community college. This morning’s English literature class was kind of boring, he felt, but was one of many required before he could move on to the science courses through which he planned on building a career. It seemed to him that the story of his life was often that of compliance with the demands of others, whether he believed them to be for his benefit or not. Nevertheless, it was a sunny late Friday morning at the end of October, & Lance was in a fairly good mood as the afternoon approached.

The problem was, Lance couldn’t stick to anything very long, & had trouble planning his future. In fact, he tended to live in the past more than in the future in general, & was envious of his friends who were landing high paying jobs in the city after college, while he flitted from one dead-end hourly paid job to the next.

The setting for our story is a suburban middle Atlantic town surrounded by rolling hills by now ablaze with the scarlet hues of maples on the golden tapestry of falling oak leaves. Patches of green struggled to survive, but the foliage was already at its peak, poised to slide day by day into the gray, dismal gloom of November. A chill in the autumn air grew as the afternoon progressed, thick clouds gathering over the colorful hills, now & again obscuring the rising full Hunter’s moon as dusk set in.

While the weather grew more unsettled, Lance made his way over to the old brick Dutch Reformed church on the edge of town. It dated from the 1700’s, & he had attended elementary school classes there when it was a one-room schoolhouse, as had his father & uncle. Going back gave him a comforting feeling, a sort of womb-like sense of emotional security emanating from the continuity of his family’s history in the quiet community.

The occasion for his visit tonight was a stalking exercise in the adjacent cemetery, arranged by a local scout troop to hone the tracking skills of the older, post high school scouts in their late teens & 20’s, qualifying them for advanced merit badge awards. Lance had agreed to help out as a judge, by spotting those who made their way from the start & followed the path of the competing squad to the south end of the cemetery. Though he no longer had an official standing with the troop, he agreed to participate as a favor to a friend, a troop leader. His big city professional buddies had repeatedly identified this sort of activity as his “living in the past”, by hanging on to his scouting connection, instead of moving on to bigger & better things, as they felt they had.

The group met at the north end of the old cemetery, ready to set out on a staggered schedule in small groups of two or three. The troop leader concluded the group’s briefing with a review of the plans for the evening’s activities, had the teams arm themselves with flashlights, & take cell phone pictures of a tattered cemetery map. The participants then split up, & Lance headed for his position to the south, picking his way along the familiar well worn paths he still knew from his school days, preparing to eventually greet the target squad & successful trackers after they had detoured, as planned, to the east & west edges of the property.

As he walked, he felt an ever deepening chill in his bones, drawing his coat collar up to shield himself from the blustery, cold night air, watching the cloudy mist of his breath as he panted faintly while traversing the hilly terrain. Some of the graves dated from the colonial 18th century era, adding to the macabre mood of the graveyard. His thoughts turned to his late girlfriend, Laura, who had perished in a fiery automobile crash the year before. At least she had died suddenly, he mused, without prolonged suffering, but preventing him from ever saying goodbye. No eulogy, or voluminous speeches at her funeral, he recalled, had left him with any firm sense of closure.

Lance approached the area where he roughly remembered her tomb had been located, & reasoned he had a good half hour or more before his stalking companions would be along. What could it hurt, he reasoned, if he paid her another brief visit while awaiting the others? Her family had been rather well off, & had a large edifice constructed on a small hilltop in the cemetery, which stood out starkly, silhouetted against the eerily somber clouds, backlit by the glowing full moon.

As he found the tomb & a faint drizzle began, Lance felt a growing compulsion to open the concrete door & actually see Laura’s grave again. He did so with great effort, as the door was heavy & the hinges were already stiff with moss in the moist climate after more than a year. It groaned audibly, & Lance paused to look around to see if anyone from the troop had unexpectedly arrived early, hearing the noise. No, he was alone with Laura, & laid himself over the footstone & grave peacefully, taking shelter from the mist now covering the area.

Although a sense of ease enveloped his being in the tomb, Lance began to notice a strange occurrence, an increasingly unavoidable erection. He tried in vain to focus on ignoring this unexpected event, figuring his mind had resurrected his strong sexual connection to Laura, as his body filled in the details with the appropriate physiologic response. As it grew, Lance found himself grinding his privates against Laura’s grave, despite the cold of the ground & his engrained inhibition for a sexual attraction in the setting of his girlfriend’s resting place. His mind provided vivid imagery of her flowing blond locks & slender, fit body as it lay, unreachable, but just beneath his.

Lance’s arousal grew, as he felt increasingly compelled to satisfy the building push of his libido. He began to masturbate, fearing all the while, however, the frightening pull of Laura’s spirit, which drew him ever more deeply into the moment.

As his heightened state of stimulation grew, Lance felt a tightening constriction around his neck & wrists, which he blamed on his overactive sexual imagination. It was reminiscent, he recognized, of the locking steel collar & handcuffs he’d let Laura place him in during their phase of experimentation with a few tentative bondage rituals. She had encouraged him to participate in these scenes more & more in the recent years before her death, but he withdrew from her overtures after a terrifying experience or two, when she teased him, left him alone in his bonds, & threatened to throw away the keys. What bothered him most was the uncharacteristically depraved, vicious, & sadistic pleasure she seemed to take in his panic. That sense of terror subsided when she relented in her efforts to involve Lance in her fantasy, but never left him completely, & it now returned to him as he lay in her tomb.

With his forceful mounting orgasm, however, Lance was distracted from his predicament, until, as he came, he heard the concrete door to the tomb creak, then shut with a dull thud. As he recovered in his post-orgasmic state, he suspected the wind had been responsible, improbable though it was. When he started to rise from Laura’s grave, however, the telltale click of padlocks in the up till now, only imagined hasps of his collar & handcuffs frightened him out of his reverie.

Lance struggled mightily, but found he was unable to free himself from the bonds that apparently were anchored tightly, somewhere deep in Laura’s grave. “How could this possibly be happening?” he asked himself. As he came to realize that the heavy steel collar & heavy duty handcuffs were somehow now real, he felt a sudden massive sense of true panic. This was the full blown terror Laura had teased him with during life, which now had become his reality in her death.

The couple, never achieving the full ambition of Laura’s bondage fantasies in life, & separated by her untimely death, was now united against all odds of logic. An imperative condition of her passion for Lance had been consummated, as she always knew it would be. Outside the now tightly sealed concrete tomb, lightning flashed & thunder boomed ominously as a pounding downpour drowned out any cries for help from within. As for Lance, he shook uncontrollably, as he was pinned in terror against Laura’s grave, giving up all hope of release from her undying passion. She now possessed him, as she had always dreamed, in body, soul, & spirit.

30.10.15